Questioning Everything: A Review of The Answers by Catherine Lacey

The Answers by Catherine Lacey explores the very idea of what feelings are and why we feel them. The idea of our identity being something that either everyone knows or no one knows. If we didn’t have names for feelings, would we feel any at all? What ties these questions together is the Girlfriend Experiment, an impossible idea. Using expert world building, the novel is set in New York that’s pretty present. Lacey interjects pop culture references like actor, Shia Labeouf’s antics and the Met Gala. Lacey brings up feminism and sexism. Characters have debts. It’s so real yet, there is this experiment happening that seems like something out of a sci-fi novel. Lacey creates a dynamic novel that flirts between thriller and literary exploration.

Even though the novel opens in the perspective of Mary, it makes sense to talk about Kurt first, he’s the lynchpin of the novel. Kurt is a character that readers will love to hate. A spoiled man with a mother complex. He thinks he’s a genius and is so self-absorbed he can’t see anything outside of himself. He doesn’t understand why his creativity is gone, not realizing you can’t be creative only focusing on you. No one around him points that out.

Because he’s famous he obsesses over privacy, but that turns into obsession with feeling “real feelings”. If no one is there to see him feeling it, how does he know it’s real? So he decided to use his directorial skills to create the Girlfriend Experiment. He actually hired an army of women for his specific needs. The Anger Girlfriend, The Mundane Girlfriend, The Emotional Girlfriend, The Maternal Girlfriend, and more. Every single need you can think of he created a role for a woman to play. The feelings are scripted, the dates scripted, even the time to say “I love you” is timed. Kurt thinks he has the perfect system, except for Mary.

Mary is the Emotional Girlfriend but she doesn’t feel much towards Kurt, doesn’t feel much of anything truthfully. Mary is emotional distant to the point that she questions what she’s feeling. Her history is mystery to most. Growing up off the grid, she didn’t watch TV or listen to the radio, she didn’t even talk to other people. Her father thought he was destined to write God’s Manifesto and when she had had enough she left to live with her aunt. Mary only joins the experiment because she became very ill and needed more money for treatment, a therapy called PAKing that involves crystals and psychic cords.

Mary is somehow constantly erased. She hasn’t ever had a chance to build herself up. When she was isolated she didn’t get to be herself, she was supposed to be the disciple that her father wanted. Then she got sick and the pain took over. Then in the Girlfriend Experiment she was who Kurt wanted her to be. By the end she wonders if anything is real, if even she can be created:

“…Ed ripping her body apart, of his telling her there was no such thing as anything and that she could destroy and remake herself, destroy and remake herself or just remained destroyed, that there was great power in being destroyed…” (163)

The reader follows Mary in the beginning but Lacey seamlessly enters the mind of Kurt and other characters. It takes a few pages to realize that someone else is doing the thinking. Kurt’s perspective is what you would expect from seeing in him through someone else’s eyes. He constantly thinking about himself. The self-absorption almost becomes too much:

“Kurt swiveled around to face Mary in the dark, the three screens behind him all paused on different close-up of his face in profile, the difference between the angles almost imperceptible. Kurt had bene playing and replaying each take, having great difficulty choosing one.” (186)

He constantly circles back to his art, and how no one is at his level. In fact, the movie he was working on for a decade is taking so long because he fired everyone working on it. No one understood him, no one saw his vision. Which is why he started the Girlfriend Experiment. He’d have people who understand him, since he scripted it. He craved Mary’s presence since she had never heard of him. He can’t believe, or stand that. When interacting with her, she is more of a mirror of what he wants to see. The experiment is the best and worst of human curiosity and technological advance. Kurt becomes so self-absorbed that he thinks he can do anything to these women and actually believes they have feelings for him. He forms an attachment to Mary, and then gets upset when she doesn’t return his feelings. Kurt is so removed that even though he shared stories that he claimed he never shared with anyone with Mary, he walks away from her so easily.

Yet, the entire novel is believable, it’s explained in such a way that you believing this can happen. Lacey is so good at making the reader forget that she is the author of the story. Instead the reader is so focused on what these characters feel and think that it’s hard to believe they aren’t real people. That this experiment could really be happening as they are reading. By the time they are done reading The Answers, you will have questions about everything.